Comments

A below average rating from me for this talk, but nothing that cannot be fixed.

For a personal taste, I didn't like all the army references. I understand the idea, as it's from the trenches. But for me personally it distracted me from the presentation.

- First, I think that the idea of the talk is ok, but i couldn't figure out for what kind of audience this talk is intended. For beginners, i think this talk is a bit too much, diving into some of the depth/trenches, which may be a bit too hard to grasp for beginners. If the talk is for more advanced users, I think most of the points are pretty much clear for most. So I guess the talk is intended for intermediate Symfony2 developers. However, not sure.

- I think the concepts of "best practices" is very good, but would have liked more real tips. Most of the things I heard are things that lot of developers already know, and I missed a lot of the time why you should do things that way, and what the pros and cons are. (for instance: use the form-builder, even for simple forms, because it takes care of csrf, and validation etc, is a great tip so people get the advantage).

- The story itself was a bit incohesive, but that's pretty common when giving presentations for the first time.

I absolutely sure that the next time that Stefan does this presentation, it will be at least a 4 rating (from me).

The talk got me interested to give Symfony2 a try for the next web application I have io build from scratch (which does not happen very often). Till now I used Zend Framework.
Indeed it was kind of a bunch of tips and tricks, but quite a number of them are useful. Maybe it would help if you sort them based on required skill level. The dependency injection was quite a heavy subject to start with if you never did a Symfony2 application. Start with the tips about finding documentation, then installing using Composer, then heavier subjects an do's and dont's.
Thanks for the talk, it was really worth the time.

Based on the title and description I was expecting some more in-depth stuff, hard lessons learned in practice. While there are some examples like that, there's also a lot of 'simple' do's and dont's for people starting with SF2.
As mentioned in the other comments, it's hard to determine what the target audience is.

However, as a developer with basic SF2 experience (no expert) I managed to pick up a few useful tips so that's good.

Ok, let me start off with saying that I just started learning SF2. So I'm looking at this talk as a complete beginner with this framework.

As a beginner I could definitely follow every point you mentioned, not that I know how I would do everything you mentioned it was a good reminder for me to look into each and everyone of those points.

Like Jeroen said I would start with the more basic things like the documentation and then go to the harder subjects.

As for the slides, I would change the blur container to a black version and give it a little less opaque, then with the text white I think you can solve 2 problems. The first is that some text was pretty unreadable. The second was like Joshua said, the slides background can be distracting.